Why do people continue to suffer from chronic diseases despite the progress of science? Why does traditional medicine eliminate symptoms, but they return again and again?
Because it treats a single organ or tissue affected by the disease, not the person as a whole. And the main thing in a person is his personality, psyche, and soul. Socrates wrote: "There is no bodily disease apart from the soul." If you treat the individual, ignoring the whole, you cannot defeat the disease!
The achievements of new sciences, such as psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, and psychoneuroendocrinology, convincingly prove that most diseases are psychosomatic in nature.
They are caused by chronic psychophysiological stress, which suppresses the immune system and other defense and self-regulatory systems of the body. Stress is caused by unresolved difficult life problems, untreated psychological trauma, intra- and interpersonal conflicts, and repressed feelings. The longer such a conflict lasts, or the longer an untreated psychotrauma persists, the deeper the chronic stress and the more seriously the function of the affected organ is impaired, up to and including the development of cancer.
Therefore, a complete cure is impossible without eliminating the psychological causes of the disease!
What is psychosomatic pathology from a scientific point of view? This health disorder occurs as a result of the process of somatization - a person's tendency to experience psychological stress at the physiological level, in other words, the "embodiment" of negative emotions in the body, which leads to the formation of uncomfortable feelings, and, if they persist, to various disorders of the structure and functions of internal organs.
Somatization can be acute, when it is mediated by acute stress (for example, the loss of a loved one) - the most striking example of this is myocardial infarction. Or persistent (chronic, persistently ongoing), reflecting protracted psychological problems, and can last a lifetime, turning into a psychosomatic disease. Such a disease indicates a violation of human integrity, a lack of harmony between the mental, social, spiritual and physical levels of human existence.
The process of forming a psychosomatic disorder begins with individual psychosomatic reactions. Their manifestations disappear when the stressful situation that caused these reactions changes. If the situation persists, a functional psychosomatic syndrome (the so-called organ neurosis - without organic changes) occurs, which is characterized by the patient's somatic symptoms. As a result, a psychosomatic disease (psychosomatosis) develops with morphological (structural) changes in the organs. It is based on the formation of psychophysiological dominant of the disease.
The most important factor that determines the severity of this process is the duration of the existence of a psychotraumatic factor (conflict) that causes chronic emotional stress. Neurosis, anxiety disorder, and depression gradually develop. This, in turn, leads to the depletion of a person's adaptive capacities and chronicization of internal organ dysfunction. In other words, the deeper the chronic psychophysiological stress is the more intense the process of somatization shifts towards organic changes.
At the dawn of psychosomatics in the middle of the last century, seven diseases were classified as psychosomatoses: bronchial asthma, arterial hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, gastric ulcer and duodenal ulcer, ulcerative colitis, thyrotoxicosis, and neurodermatitis.
Despite the fact that even orthodox medicine has recognized these diseases as psychosomatic, they are still treated mainly with medication - simply because most people do not know that psychotherapy is the most beneficial in their treatment!
Subsequently, this list was expanded to include myocardial infarction, angina (coronary heart disease), osteochondrosis, eczema, psoriasis, shingles, mastopathy, psychosomatic thyrotoxicosis, and type 2 diabetes mellitus, obesity and somatoform disorders, irritable bowel, gallbladder dyskinesia, chronic pancreatitis and infertility with excluded pathology of the reproductive system, and others. Today, psychosomatics "...shows a clear desire to expand its competence to include groups of diseases that have traditionally been classified as internal, infectious, neurological and mental illnesses," writes Walter Breutigam, a prominent representative of psychosomatic medicine in Germany. And as the book "Carcinogenic Mind" written by the head of our center, Candidate of Medical Sciences V. L. Matrenitsky, proves, even cancer can be considered a psychosomatic disease.
In general, the division of diseases into "psycho-" and "somatic" ones is losing all meaning today. It is becoming increasingly clear that any human pathology is primarily a psychosocial problem. You may ask why medicine does not "shout" about this. Who among doctors wants to lose their jobs, clients, their usual way of life, retrain...? In fact, pharmacologically-oriented medicine should rightly be called symptomatic medicine, focused only on eliminating bodily signals of psychological problems.
What is the peculiarity of the integrative psychosomatology we are developing? Integrative means approaching a person as a single system, where body, energy, mind and spirituality are equal partners. Therefore, unlike classical psychosomatology, which is based mainly on the psychoanalytic principles of Sigmund Freud, we work with patients at the corresponding four levels of their being.
The latest scientific evidence shows that psychotherapy in the treatment of somatic diseases has the same real and profound effect on the body as pharmacological drugs.
According to research conducted at the University of Miami, psychotherapy reduces the content of the stress agent cortisol in the blood, and the activity of genes responsible for inflammatory reactions in white blood cells. Scientists from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences have shown that the use of suggestive methods can cause a long-term increase in the content of stem cells in the peripheral blood and an increase in the length of telomeres (end chromosomes) of lymphocytes. This was reflected in the normalization of patients' immune status. A study of DNA by Italian scientists found that psychotherapy leads to changes in gene activity within 90 to 120 minutes of starting it.
Thus, under the influence of our therapy program, changes occur in the genetic apparatus of organs and tissues, which is the biological basis for activating the processes of healing from the disease.
We treat any psychosomatic illnesses, including psychosomatic diseases:
- rheumatoid arthritis
- fibromyalgia
- bronchial asthma
- migraine
- irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis
- gastric ulcer and duodenal ulcer
- thyrotoxicosis (hyperthyroidism)
- psychogenic infertility
- gynecological diseases
- chronic pelvic pain
- neurodermatitis (atypical dermatitis), psoriasis, eczema
- allergies
- diabetes mellitus
- metabolic syndrome
- and other stress-related syndromes: early aging, encephalopathy, the effects of Covid-19, chronic fatigue, etc.
